Campaigning and Communication Workshop The best practices session
11 February 2021
The BLUE AP Project
Clementina Taliento,
Press and communication officer – Kyoto Club
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Good morning from Rome!
Our warmest thanks to:
the YUVA Association Colleagues for the invitation for today’s presentation and to KOZA members, too.
Today I will tell you about the BLUE AP LIFE+ project, which took place from 2012 to 2015. Kyoto Club was a partner of the project together with other important partners: Ambiente Italia and ARPA Emilia-Romagna.
The leader of the project was the Municipality of Bologna.
BLUE AP was a successful campaign in terms of creating
wide public support (nation wide or city wide) for the global
warming cause and for the need for adaptation plan for cities
(Bologna).
BLUE AP – Bologna Local Urban Environment Adaptation Plan for a Resilient
City was a LIFE+ project for the implementation of an Adaptation Plan to
Climate Change for the Municipality of Bologna, providing for some concrete
local measures to test, in order to make the city more resilient and able to meet
the climate change challenges.
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Municipality of Bologna
Bologna is a founding member of ICLEI, the international network of governments for sustainability, partner of Eurocities and Local Agenda 21 in Italy.
Upon acceding to the Aalborg Commitments (2006) and the Covenant of Mayors (2008), the city of Bologna strengthens its presence among the European cities active in the field of sustainable development, aiming the development of solutions for a sustainable resource management in a time of profound economic and social changes.
Arpa Emilia-Romagna
ARPA is the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection in Emilia-Romagna.It is an environmental control technical support body to the regional and local authorities and is administratively and technically independent. In particular, The Hydro-Meteo-Climate. Service is responsible for operational meteorological, climatological, agrometeorological, radarmeteorological, hydrographical, hydrologic and meteo-environmental activities, providing short and medium-term, regional forecasts and local nowcasting products.
Ambiente Italia
Ambiente Italia is accredited as an expert European center for urban and environmental policies and has been approved as ESCO from the Italian Energy Authority.
Kyoto Club
Kyoto Club is a non-profit organisation founded in February 1999. Its members are business companies, associations and local municipalities and governments engaged in reaching the greenhouse gas reduction targets set by the Kyoto Protocol, by the EU ones for 2030 and by the December 2015 Paris Agreement.
About BLUE AP project partners
What is the BLUE AP project?
BLUE AP project was a successful communication campaign, conceived for the climate change Adaptation Plan for the city of Bologna.
Kyoto Club has followed all the communication activities and participatory processes (with the collaboration of “Centro Antartide” of Bologna). Participatory processes were meetings for the definition of the Plan.
Let’s deepen the communication activities and all the steps of the project!
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Bologna is one of the first pilot cities in Italy to equip itself with the necessary tools to face the challenge of global warming, which is now a priority for both public and private institutions. BLUE AP also fits within the framework of commitments that the city has taken on issues relating to climate change, including the SEAP (Action Plan for Sustainable Energy) and the Life GAIA project - urban forestry.
The project included an intense communication, dissemination and networking
activity in order to inform citizens and increase their awareness on the issues of
adaptation to climate change. The results of the project were also disseminated at
local, national and European level through the creation of communication tools and
participation in national and international events.
The project aimed to:
• create an innovative information system that integrates environmental and social data, capable of producing new information on environmental risks and the best strategies to deal with them;
• increase the awareness of local authorities, socio-economic actors and citizens on the real risks of the climate change in the Bologna area, motivating them to adopt more environmentally conscious behaviors and responsible management of water resources;
• offer local stakeholders technical and training support to plan and to implement some of the actions defined in the Adaptation Plan. BLUE AP also played a “start-up”
role, launching pilot actions in the Bologna area, with the participation of local businesses and actors;
• monitor and to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of the actions implemented and the results that emerged during the implementation of the project;
• share and to communicate the guidelines and the results of the project, promoting
the dissemination and sharing the know-how to allow other local communities to use
the models developed.
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
In 2018, the European Commission's CRC recognized BLUE AP as the best climate adaptation practice for the cities
The template relating to the Bologna Adaptation Plan was found to be
"the best and most consistent of all the templates that have been
evaluated“ by the Joint Research Center (CRC) of the European
Commission. The CRC has the prerogative of evaluating the Covenant of
Mayors and the Climate Adaptation Action Plans in Europe.
BLUE AP project steps
BLUE AP for a resilient city Bologna resilient city!
What does it mean to be a resilient community?
How to build resilient communities through a participatory process?
To build a resilient community thanks to a participatory process and thanks to the involvement of civil society:
This was the challenge of the BLUE AP project
BLUE AP created the Bologna Adaptation Plan and defined, with citizens and stakeholders, the six pilot actions.
Let’s see how the
participatory process of the
Adaptation Plan of the city
of Bologna took place!
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
BLUE AP
Participatory Process Its goal was to bring together the stakeholders to discuss the
definition of the Adaptation Plan of the city of Bologna.
During the first phase: environmental criticalities and the effects of climate change were assessed. The meetings were interactive. The goal was to collect proposals for the implementation of the plan.
In the second phase: the meetings took place with
small focus groups. During the meetings discussed the
proposals of the Plan and evaluating its
implementation.
Adaptation Plan
• Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Its goal was developing, perfecting and implementing a replicable bottom-up process to address climate challenges thanks the support of the local community, politicians, citizens, representatives of the production sector, etc.
Within the participation process, the definition of the Adaptation Plan was outlined.
Strategies and a selection of actions were associated with each of the vulnerabilities identified by the Local Climate Profile.
BLUE AP
Participatory Process
Adaptation Plan
• Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
BLUE AP
Participatory Process
It was a bottom-up replicable process that included:
3 public events in Bologna (50 participants) 18 workshops
100 surveys on financial challenges and on the topics of climate change
1 internal peer-review
1 discussion session with other EU cities 2 expert round tables
3 thematic sessions on agriculture, industry and civil society
5 focus groups (topics: urban greening,
agriculture and urban gardens, extreme weather events, permeability projects for commercial and industrial areas, economy and development of the territory)
20 restricted sessions
1 session with the political decision makers of the
Municipality.
BLUE AP focus groups
The five focus groups organized in the second phase of the participatory process addressed the following issues:
1) Urban greening
2) Agriculture and urban gardens
3) Interventions on the occasion of extreme weather events
4) Permeabilization projects for commercial, industrial and civil areas
5) Economy and development of the territory
A networking event was organized during Resilient Cities 2014 in Bonn (Germany). It was a presentation event of the BLUE AP project and its activities for the adaptation plan. It was an event which involved stakeholders and public from civil society.
During the event, BLUE AP partners asked to all the city’s delegations to prepare a short presentation for 30mins of PechaKucha show. (PechaKucha is a simple presentation format where the speaker shows 20 images, each for 20 seconds.
The images advance automatically, and the speaker talks along to the images).
Each team had 3minx6slides to present its
most valuable Resilient Action. The winner
won a travel to Bologna for the Blue Ap
final conference.
Local Climate Profile
Source: Emilia Romagna Hydro-climatic Atlas Analysis of vulnerabilities and the impact of climate change
It is the main tool for the analysis of climate vulnerability and the consequent
development of adaptation measures for the city. Its purpose was to provide
knowledge of the territories from the point of view of its vulnerabilities related to
climate change and projections for the next decades highlighting the risks and
opportunities related to resilience.
This action concerned the analysis of climate variability, at different levels:
European, Italian, regional (Emilia Romagna) and on a local scale (Bologna), on which future climate scenarios were built.
The climatic variables analyzed: the minimum, maximum temperature and the amount of precipitation, both medium and extreme fields.
The second part of the action was focused on the analysis of the territory, identifying the major vulnerabilities that emerge in relation to climate projections.
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Local Climate Profile
The development of the Plan, together with the involvement of stakeholders in the urban area, led to the selection of possible actions to be carried out in the public and private sectors.
Topics: climate, air quality, potable water, ground water and green.
BLUE AP Adaptation Plan
The Adaptation Plan was approved on 8th September 2015 by the City Board:
the Plan was discussed during the Environmental Commission on 30th
September 2015 and approved by the
City Council on 5th October 2015.
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Monitoring
Monitoring actions of the impacts of the project was based on two main tools:
1. The Protocol "Monitoring the impact of climate change (risk and vulnerability)"
based on what is defined in the Local Climate Profile
2. The Protocol "Monitoring the level of
implementation of the actions envisaged by
the Adaptation Plan ".
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
Stakeholders engagement
The “Stakeholder engagement outcomes” contained the 10 pilot actions
tested in the Bologna area with the involvement of stakeholders. The
actions concerned: the new objectives for water saving in the Urban
Building Regulations; guidelines for infrastructures at risk; the launch of an
information campaign “Green up Bologna”; improving the drainage
capacity of waterproofed areas; the creation of rainwater collection
systems and sustainable water management; the incentive of insurance
mechanisms.
Stakeholders engagment
outcome aimed to
summarize the results obtained in the stakeholders enagagement process.
It aimed to improve the bottom-up participatory process, many efforts have been done to build up an enagagement programme which best suits the social envirovonment and the production industry.
Stakeholders engagment in
developing public policies
depended on the level of
partecipation in the making
decision process.
BLUE AP survey
Kyoto Club – Against climate change, with new energies
The Municipality of Bologna, in collaboration with Kyoto Club, Ambiente Italia and ARPA E.R., carried out a fact- finding survey on the issues of climate change and adaptation as part of the LIFE + BLUE AP project.
The surveys (100 copies) for businesses on
adaptation to climate change helped the
Municipality of Bologna to determine the
degree of knowledge of climate change and
represented the basis for future actions.
Gadgets:
To spread the BLUE AP project, in addition to the classic gadgets (USB sticks and personalized handbags), gadgets were also created in consideration of the themes that emerged in the focus groups:
• "vegetable garden in the city" kit
• "Sow flowers" butterflies
• Fans (in graphic design);
• Billboards / posters
The information on the project, regarding the phases and actions of BLUE AP, was also reinforced by public billposting of posters in the territory of the Municipality of Bologna, with the main goal to attract citizens, informing them about the Bologna adaptation plan.
Brochure
A BlueAp booklet report was created in addition to
the project leaflets.
• Billboard in a street in Bologna
• Gadgets
• Corner, installed in Piazza
Maggiore (central square)
in Bologna
An online game in a web App was created: @PlayBlueAp was an application to raise awareness among the citizens of Bologna.
The PlayBlueAp game was created by imagining the city as a friend or a family member, with whom to share experiences and take care of.
In a confidential and easy-to-read
tone, Bologna communicated its
state of health in real time!
Thanks to all the
communication actions that have had the objective of actively involving citizens, as well as stakeholders, Bologna has succeeded in its objective to raise
awareness among citizens and civil society on this important issue of adaptation to climate change, preparing them for the adoption of all the measures contained in the final step of the project with the Adaptation Plan.
